November 18, 2010

During an NPR interview about his new book, Decoded, Jay-Z addressed the recent volleys between Kanye West, his protégé, and Bush, a fellow traveler on the book-tour circuit. (Briefly: West said Bush didn’t “care about black people” at a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser; Bush now cites it as a low point of his presidency; and West recently apologized for the statement when confronted by Matt Lauer, and then walked it back on Twitter.)

Katrina "didn’t feel like a natural disaster, it felt like something that was happening directly to blacks and it immediately brought us back to the images of people getting beaten, sprayed with hose, and beaten on the bridge in Selma,” he explained. “Kanye really spoke what everyone else felt. When he said everyone was immediately like, ‘That’s exactly how we all feel,’” Jay-Z continued, “it felt more than a national disaster. We felt like if that had happened somewhere else, that wouldn’t be happening, and calling people a ‘refugee’ in their own home.”

Jay-Z cast Kanye’s new, fleeting apology as distinct from the original confrontation with Bush: “If Kanye apologized, you know, he said it, that’s how he felt, but you know, what he said [in 2005], that’s how everyone felt.”

As for Bush’s feelings, Jay-Z argued it was telling that a low point for the leader of the free world was just about himself. “I find it strange, like everyone should, that one of his lowest points was somebody talking about him,” Jay-Z told NPR. “He’s the president, you know, people should insult him a lot. That’s part of the job description, people are not gonna be happy with what you do.”

There is another revealing facet to Bush’s reaction: It shows how powerful people sometimes take criticism beyond the political arena quite seriously. The Watergate recordings from the Nixon White House, for example, reveal that the president was livid about talk show host Dick Cavett, asking if there are ways to “screw him.”

Going back to Katrina in 2005, it was nonpolitical figures like West who first voiced some of the most pointed questions about whether race and wealth played a role in the government response. For his part, Jay-Z never matched West’s language—they have similar politics yet different styles—but he has also weighed in. Jay-Z recorded “Minority Report,” a subtle, searching song about the political, media and philanthropic responses to Katrina—with lyrics that also took rich rappers to task:

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Poor kids just [ignored] cause they were poor kids,
Left ’em on they porches same old story in New Orleans
Silly rappers, because we got a couple Porches
MTV stopped by to film our fortresses
We forget the unfortunate
Sure I ponied up a mill, but I didn’t give my time
So in reality I didn’t give a dime—or a damn
I just put my monies in the hands of the same people that left my people stranded
Nothin’ but a bandit
Left them folks abandoned
Damn, that money that we gave was just a band-aid
Can’t say we better off than we was before
In synopsis, this is my minority report

Discussing his new book, Jay-Z says the song teed off frustration with events “like Katrina,” where “you see people on the roof and people of color for the most part, and there’s ‘Help’ [sign] on the roof, and this is happening in America on TV. And then you see the Commander in Chief, you know, just drive by on a plane.”

Finally, as for the following president, whom Jay-Z boosted with campaign concerts, voter registration events, BarackObama.com videos and even a victory performance for staff at the inauguration, the rapper/author is taking the long view. “In order to judge Obama, you have to judge what happened before, you have to judge what he inherited,” Jay-Z said. “I think a lot of people would like to forget what we were coming out of and what was left on the desk for the incoming president,” he argued, adding, “if you think he can fix eight years worth of damage…in two years, then I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s even realistic.”

Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy.
Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com.
Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent.
He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign.
As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.